PCoIP Enhancements Coming to VMware View – 75% Bandwidth Improvement

This morning Vittorio Viarengo, vice president, End-User Computing for VMware is participating in what promises to be an exciting session at the Gartner Catalyst Conference. Moderated by Gartner’s, Chris Wolf – the session (titled: Protocol Wars: What Matters) will look at the current state of desktop virtualization display protocols.

Display protocols have been the source of considerable debate since we adopted PCoIP with the launch of VMware View 4. VMware View with PCoIP changed the game in 2009 – delivering an unparalleled end-user experience to users. As a result, the industry has seen greater competition and new levels of innovation that have benefited customers.

We continue to innovate, recently extending the benefits of VMware View with PCoIP to iPads and Android-based tablets. And, with the next release of VMware View, new PCoIP enhancements result in up to a 75% bandwidth improvement.

Thanks to our ongoing collaboration and co-development with Teradici, we are extending PCoIP’s progress as a leading remoting protocol for the delivery of a hi-fidelity virtual desktop experience. And, by leveraging graphics capabilities unique to VMware vSphere 5, VMware View with PCoIP will enable IT administrators to deliver user capabilities exclusive to VMware View.

So, what are some of the things you can look forward to?

New PCoIP Performance Settings:

An update to the lossless CODEC. One of the leading causes of high bandwidth utilization for remoting protocols has historically been from advancements of fonts such as ClearType fonts. This has been well known for some time. One of the new enhancements for VMware View with PCoIP is an update to the PCoIP lossless CODEC used for text that will improve compression – resulting in lower bandwidth requirements.

Implementation of client side caching. With new advanced capabilities, View will cache images and portions of the desktop composition to minimize retransmission of pixels across the network. This results in a significant reduction in the bandwidth of individual sessions – perfect for static screen content that does not need to be updated or in situations where only a portion needs to be refreshed. A configurable setting, administrators will have the option to enable, disable and configure the amount of cache used.

The ability to disable build to lossless. Many of you familiar with PCoIP know one of the biggest benefits of PCoIP is the rich user experience it provides and its unique ability to offer a fully lossless experience. For users who want to maximize bandwidth savings vs. lossless image quality, we will provide an option for disabling PCoIP build to lossless in favor of build to perceptual lossless. Providing this capability allows customers the option to choose the right solution for their individual deployments.

Based on early testing results these new capabilities combined, result in up to 75% bandwidth savings. These are just few of the new exciting capabilities that we will be highlighting over the coming weeks.

That said, we believe that the protocol debate has distracted from what really matters. We think that it’s time for the industry to move on. To shift the discussion from protocols wars, to helping customers deploy better desktops and embark on a journey towards a new way to work.